Quote of the week: Steyn ups the ante on the Mann lawsuit

Oh, my. Steyn is not going to pull any punches after seeing what Esra Levant just did in Canada. He hints at a strategy to “go nuclear”. He writes:

When I ran into trouble with the “human rights” commissions five years ago, I had lunch with an old friend in Montreal who said just stay quiet, keep your head down, it’ll all blow over. If I’d taken his advice, I would have lost, Maclean’s would have lost, Canada’s media would have lost basic free press rights, and Canadian citizens would have lost basic free speech rights. And then I ran into Ezra Levant, who said no, you need to go nuclear. That’s Ezra’s advice for everything – parking ticket, slow line at Tim Hortons, whatever.

So we did go nuclear.

And Elmasry and the Canadian Islamic Congress couldn’t withstand the publicity, any more than the “human rights” racket could. By the time the CIC lost in court in British Columbia, they had already lost in a far more profound sense. I wish I were in Madam Justice Matheson’s courtroom rather than trapped on a roulette wheel of procedural sophistry in the District of Columbia. But I promise you this: by the time this is through, Michael Mann will have lost as profoundly as Elmasry did.

More on Ezra’s day in court here and here. To help support my pushback against Mann, please see here and here.

126 thoughts on “Quote of the week: Steyn ups the ante on the Mann lawsuit”

I so hope Steyn wins, but to call Mann a fraud was reckless, since that word can mean many things, some of which are libelous unless proven true. Which is usually very hard to do because you have to prove intent to deceive as opposed to error.

“to call Mann a fraud was reckless, since that word can mean many things, some of which are libelous unless proven true. Which is usually very hard to do because you have to prove intent to deceive as opposed to error.”

Very helpful to see Steyn mention and answer Mark Steyn Has A Fool For A Client by Ken White two weeks before. The man has his reasons. To despatch both Elmasry and Mann, in the two very differing jurisdictions, would be quite a double. Go team Steyn.

I so hope Steyn wins, but to call Mann a fraud was reckless, since that word can mean many things, some of which are libelous unless proven true. Which is usually very hard to do because you have to prove intent to deceive as opposed to error.
Actually, he said the hockey stick was f—-ent, which it was. I wouldn’t call it “reckless”. Brave, perhaps. Sometimes in war, a brave few have to stick their heads above the parapet.

Mann is screwed no matter the outcome. He is unemployable because he has become a sh*t magnet. Any support he currently has will gradually be withdrawn. He is high profile in a bad way. Most institutions are conservative.
M. Mann R.I.P.

I think the word fr@ud should simply be removed from the dictionary. Its use is obviously too dangerous for mere mortals. I noticed Yahoo finance used it the other day in regards to herbalife. Herbalife should hire Mann’s henchmen to put down Yahoo.

Steyn called Mann a “Fraud” which is definitely libellous. The only way Steyn can win is to prove that Mann had intent to commit fraud, and not just that Mann made many mistakes. Obviously Steyn’s lawyers will have told him this. So when Steyn says he will go nuclear, that means he has the evidence. This will be good. Very good. Very very good. And very bad for Mann.

When lampooning his targets, Christopher Hitchens was very fond of employing the term “Chaucerian fraud” and I don’t believe he was ever sued for it. One particular character in The Canterbury Tales who cries out for comparison with a number contemporary fraudsters is the Pardoner, who is in the business of obtaining Divine forgiveness for sinners – at a price. If he were alive today, he would no doubt be selling carbon offsets.

Here’s an excerpt from the WIkipedia entry on The Pardoner’s Tale

The prologue takes the form of a literary confession in the same manner as The Wife of Bath’s Prologue.[4] However, rather than an apology for his vices, the Pardoner boasts of his duping of his victims, for whom he has nothing but contempt.[4] He says that his “theme”—biblical text for a sermon—is Radix malorum est cupiditas (“Greed is the root of [all] evils” 1 Timothy 6.10).[1] He explains that his false credentials consist of official letters from high-ranking church officials and a superficial use of a few Latin words;[5] then he will produce some “relics”, and claim that among them is a bone which has miraculous powers when dipped into a well and a mitten for which:

He that his hand wol putte in this mitayn,
He shal have multipliyng of his greyn, (lines 373–374)
But he will warn that any person that “hath doon synne horrible” will not be able to benefit from these relics.[6] The Pardoner says to the pilgrims that by these tricks he has acquired a considerable sum of money. He goes on to relate how he stands like a clergy at the pulpit, and preaches against avarice but to gain the congregation’s money; he doesn’t care for the correction of sin or for their souls.[7] Against anyone that offends either him or other pardoners, he will “stynge hym with my tonge smerte”. Although he is guilty of avarice himself, he reiterates that his theme is always Radix malorum … and that he can nonetheless preach so that others turn away from the vice and repent—though his “principal entente” is for personal gain. The Pardoner explains that he then offers many anecdotes to the “lewed [ignorant, unlearned] people”.[8] He scorns the thought of living in poverty while he preaches; he desires “moneie, wolle [wool], chese, and whete”[9] and doesn’t care whether it were from the poorest widow in the village, even should her children starve for famine. Yet, he concludes to the pilgrims, though he may be a “ful vicious man”, he can tell a moral tale and proceeds.

@ Richard “does not giving up raw data and computer codes count as intent to deceive.”

Good question. Ordinarily I would say no, but in matters of science, showing your data is part of the process. It would be especially worth noting if Mann’s papers were published in journals that require having data available as a matter of editorial policy. In that case, the violation of standing policy would be clear evidence that Mann was attempting to circumvent best practices.

When one ‘proxy temperature record’ is crudely terminated in the graph – and some say hidden in the spaghetti mess – because it is about to head in the ‘wrong’ direction, what would one call that besides what Steyn called it?

We need a paypal button so people can contribute without buying anything.

Just buy vouchers and never redeem them. Amounts to the same thing, after all.

…I’m saying this from the other side of the planet, so I might be very wrong, but contributions may be viewed as income (and taxed?), whereas a purchased gift certificate will have to be recorded as a debt – a much more effective way to contribute.

Tim Groves says: When lampooning his targets, Christopher Hitchens was very fond of employing the term “Chaucerian fraud”

The Caunterbury Tales starts with a weather forecast which I am hoping may prove correct…

Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote
The droughte or Marche hath perced to the rote,

A bit of Marchly droughte would not go amiss. At the end of his tale the Pardoner slips momentarily out of character and tries to gather himself by selling his wares to the pilgrims. Their host is quick to squash him…

Thou woldest make me kisse thyn old breech
And swere it were the relik of a seint.

A Steyn moment? Actually odd because it sounds as if their host has given up all thoughts of heaven, even though they are in that brief period when your sins counted for the duration of your visit to purgatory rather than a one way ticket to damnation we have today.

I probably sit on the fence on the Steyn vs Mann case and put it in the people behaving badly category. There is a very sobering message to Mann in these cases which is best put by Sue Scheff as “the winner” in a bitter Internet Defamation case winning damages for $11 Million dollars.

The result did almost nothing to help Sue Scheff’s plight you can not win against someone who really does not care about the result in full on warfare.

I side with Ken White and much of legal view expressed on his site. I suspect Mann will find this gets very ugly very fast and even if you saw it to a conclusion, if Steyn really is prepared to go down in flames in an uncompromising war you gain nothing.

Don’t you think Mann’s scientific reputation has already been disposed of by the ‘scientific ‘self-correction’ process, if fellow scientists giggling behind his back is a reasonable definition of ‘scientific self-correction’?

luca turin (@lucaturin) says:
March 10, 2014 at 4:08 am
I so hope Steyn wins, but to call Mann a fraud was reckless
==============
Are you sure? Didn’t Steyn actually call Mann famous? What did the article actually say?

“I so hope Steyn wins, but to call Mann a fraud was reckless, since that word can mean many things, some of which are libelous unless proven true.”

But that’s irrelevant. If only one of those meanings can be proven to either be non-libelous, (whether by being true or non-damaging) provided that the person who uses a word can plausibly claim he used that meaning, it isn’t libel.

The fact that a word has more than one meaning does not provide license to insist that someone “really meant” something other than what they actually meant to convey by using it, despite how fashionable such “reinterpretation” has become in some quarters. Certain officially recognized victim groups have made an industry out of sussing out “wolf whistle” meanings and decoding super-secret racist/sexist/homophobic language. It’s downright amazing how quickly these people can find such meaning in what others say.

Guy Holder says:
March 10, 2014 at 5:19 am
We need a paypal button so people can contribute without buying anything.
Just buy vouchers and never redeem them. Amounts to the same thing, after all.

…I’m saying this from the other side of the planet, so I might be very wrong, but contributions may be viewed as income (and taxed?), whereas a purchased gift certificate will have to be recorded as a debt – a much more effective way to contribute.
===========================================================
A gift certificate is indeed a debt. A million dollars in debt – they spent $500K on the first appeal to dismiss – may be a promise that you know or should know that you can’t make good on. To solicit while knowing you can’t make good on your promise is – fraud. Now imagine a Bill McKibben type purchasing Steyn certificates and then suing him for fraud. Also imagine an ambitious US Attorney General or State’s Attorney of the applicable ideology prosecuting for criminal violation.

The Deep Pockets of Dark Money on Mann’s Side – or whatever they call themselves – get contributions that are tax-laundered.

If I say to Michael Mann, I think you are a fraud, Sir, because you will not show me the data and compute code, from which you are making proclamations where decisions are being made about possibly affecting my bank balance.

What is the situation? If I am specific surely if he took me to court he would have to offer up the info.

Ah in the old days a good duel at dawn would take care of this one way or another.

Mark Steyn made not agree but, for some reason, this trial reminds me of the illustrious Mae West, the siren of her time. The sultry Mae West was brought to court on obscenity charges. Never one to be cowed, when asked in trial if she was showing contempt of court she responded, “No, I’m trying my best to hide it.”

She once said (probably not an exact quote), “When I’m good I’m very good. But, when I’m bad, I’m better!”

Mann has a scorched earth strategy against anyone who has a reason based finding of ‘no confidence’ in his body of work that he claims is ‘consensus’ science. He is no friend of science, only a friend of his own hubris.

Steyn recognizes Mann’s scorched earth strategy and adopts a reasonable counter strategy. Steyn is letting Mann scorch every bit of his own credibility within the scientific community.

Did not Mann’s hockey stick plot dispense with the Medieval Warming Period? The existence of that warm period has never, ever been a matter of dispute.
Are we to believe that Mann was unaware of this discrepancy?
Has it not been shown that Mann’s algorithm, which produced the hockey stick, will also produce a hockey stick if the entered data are random numbers?
Are we to believe that Mann was unaware of this?
What part of Climate Gate testifies to the honesty of Mann?

Frankly, Mann is a total fraud and has STOLEN taxpayer funds to fund his scam. He is Bernie Madoff in climate drag . He should be forced to pay back every penny he has received in funding – plus pay a huge fine- plus sent to jail for 100 years. PENN STATE and his former employer, UVA, should also be heavily fined and punished for sponsoring his fraud.

I read through the first dozen or so comments, then couldn’t stand any more. Mark Steyn is a g.d. hero, a guy with the brains, courage, and style to finally nail that loony coward Michael Mann for good and all. This has the potential to be orders of magnitude more damaging than the recent “ship of fools” fiasco, perhaps even approaching or exceeding“climate-gate” in the damage it might do to the warmist agenda..

That hockey stick graph galvanized the world around the issue of global warming. At the time I was a wavering warmist, and it temporarily convinced me that CAGW was imminent. I’m sure it did many others. And it was a fraud! It’s almost unbelievable. Perhaps ultimately even more damaging to the cause, is that all those establishment climate scientists who damn well know by now it was a fraud, are by their silence revealing their utter lack of integrity.

Any skeptics who can afford to send money to Steyn who have not yet done so, should be ashamed.

Mann might not have intended to commit fraud when he first published his paper, but he has not materially corrected anything after it has been shown his statistics and methodology were suspect.
In fact, he has conspired with his cohorts, as shown in the Climategate emails, to prevent anything that shows his work is questionable. To me, that is fraud.

The problem is that Steyn has decided to be his own lawyer. He could very well be right on the merits, but lose because he doesn’t understand the law, because he will get outfoxed on a technicality that will sink his case. And then we will all be losers, because Michael Mann will have won, and won a case that had Steyn had a real lawyer, he would not have won.

As I opened my lap top today…lead head line bar on yahoo and at&t….
“Unknown gases indanger the Ozone layer”….!!!
If you allow them to control the message they take your rights away day after day after day.

We let a traitor off the hook allowed this fraud with fake awards and citations in a combat zone get away with lies about American Fighting men. What we got was Sec. of State John F. Kerry.

Stop us if you’ve heard this: Piddling administrative rulings aside, the U.S. court system is not only dysfunctional but actively maleficent, exploited by peculating “attorneys” whose sole conventional purpose is to delay, obfuscate unintelligible legalisms to their extortionate benefit.

It is more than plausible that NRO/CEI could prevail in their anti-Slapp appeals. They will surely argue, first, that Judge Weisberg’s ruling characterizing their respective alleged libels as statements of fact and not expressions of opinion is judicially unsustainable. They should win on that point. Case dismissed.

That appeal decision will, in all likelihood, be rendered long before Steyn’s trial case would ever appear on the DC Court’s calendar.

An NRO/CEI appeal victory would have enormous negative consequence to Mann’s case against Steyn. In fact, Mann would likely have to approach Steyn, hat in hand, for an out-of-court settlement of their opposing claims. That prospect is a delicious one indeed.

“Steyn called Mann a “Fraud” which is definitely libellous. The only way Steyn can win is to prove that Mann had intent to commit fraud, and not just that Mann made many mistakes.”

If you would have read Steyn’s offending blurb on NRO (check out SteynOnline), you would have noted that he said Mann’s hockey stick was fraudulent. Steyn never called Mann a fraud. And being a professional pundit, Steyn is allowed to express his opinions freely. Using your logic, Mann could sue every commenter who used far worse language than Steyn’s.

You inadvertently prove Steyn’s main theme these days: the rapid loss of Free Speech in this nation. Before long, every single American will be required to lawyer-up when expressing even the slightest opinion that deviates from public orthodoxy.

It has been mentioned once on this thread, but but only once, so I’ll mention it again, Steyn doesn’t have to prove a thing. Mann has to prove by preponderance of the evidence that Steyn libeled him, and that is very hard to do, because Mann is a public figure. This bears repeating, because the opposite has been stated several times on this thread.

You have to appreciate what Steyn’s doing here. He’s basically flipping the bird to the US Justice system. If a guy can spend 1/2 a million bucks in attorney fees for a year’s worth of silence and litigation that results in the judge being unable to identify the parties, then something is seriously wrong. The federal gov’t should refund his costs for hiring incompetent judges and wasting everybody’s time. Steyn may very well lose the trial – he’s doing it at minimum expense. Then it’s up to the appeal. The US Justice system can flush the first amendment down the crapper to ensure that other defendants don’t follow Steyn’s lead and rob lawyers of their take, or it can stand up for principle and reaffirm the concept of freedom of speech. Either way, it’ll be good to know where we stand in this country. And either way, it’ll be one hell of a show.

I don’t know, Jim Bo. There are political undercurrents to this lawsuit. I’ve speculated that the D. C. judges might have it in for Steyn and those who launch personal attacks against “consensus” climate scientists. Unlike Combs Greene, Weisberg is apparently a competent judge, but he does have a history of liberal connections and rulings. Those of us who post on skeptic websites are perhaps a little deluded as to what is going on in other areas of the culture where “all they know is what they read in the papers,” so to speak.

Certainly, McIntyre’s work would lead one to think that the case should be dismissed. But again, in the current atmosphere in Washington, it wouldn’t surprise me to see motions to dismiss be denied and the trial proceed.

I hope he wins, not just for the effect on Mann (and himself), but also to help put an end to using the coercive power of the state (and a corrupt tort system) to block legitimate inquiry/debate into how our money is being spent and who is truly steering the ship. This goes for public institutions of higher learning, e.g., UVA, too.

“I side with Ken White and much of legal view expressed on his site. I suspect Mann will find this gets very ugly very fast and even if you saw it to a conclusion, if Steyn really is prepared to go down in flames in an uncompromising war you gain nothing.”

@LdB,
You final sentence is a bit disturbing in that your phrase “gain nothing” stands against an eroding Right to Free Speech. Steyn is no ametuer pundit. He has been involved with the media in one shape or another for 30 years, and has practiced his trade across 4 different countries and 2 continents. The courts ruling concerning dismissal on Anti-Slapp grounds should keep editors awake at night. Steyn has decided since that ruling to counter-sue; thus, forcing Mann et als to turn over a decades worth of professional correspondence (including the notorious Climategate emails), as well as every single scrap of paper supporting Mann’s scientific publications (something that FOI requests have failed to do). In civil suits all is fair game. Mann stands not only to further have his blotted reputation sullied. But more importantly, he will take down a good number of co-conspirators (The Team) with him. Before this is over, Dr Michael Mann will be standing alone with no friend to fall back on. The Team is quietly disbanding and moving on. They after all have mortgages to pay, and retirement accounts to grow.

For some perverse reason Americans take perverse pride in our unjust legal system. Charles Dickens masterpiece, Bleak House, pales in comparison to what the modern day legal system in America has become. Steyn recently noted how in the US judges have taken on the air of nobility. One is not allowed to speak ill of our judges not matter how poorly they perform. The idea of an impartial judge long ago left the court rooms. If one is a pundit one must tread lightly for fear of offending the one man or woman who someday may have your life in their hands. Everyone knows the game is rigged to allow the maximum amount of billable hours. Judges being lawyers, in the end make sure his fellow lawyers get their cut. We are the only nation in the free world that allows its legal system to be turned into a contorted maze of legal abstractions for the sole purpose of collecting the last red cent.

Mann and his lawyers of course understand all of this. Their goal is to destroy Free Speech through endless, and horribly expensive litigation.

I don’t believe I’ve commented directly on the oft-retailed line by m’learned friends around the tort end of the blogosphere that “Mark Steyn has a fool for a client”. That’s an old English joke, of course. Circa 18th century, I believe, when English life was very lightly lawyered. Whether it applies a quarter-millennium on in a sclerotic dungheap of a system that, as my old boss Conrad Black likes to point out, employs as many lawyers as the rest of the planet combined, who between them invoice ten per cent of GDP. If the lawyerization of American life needs to snort up its nose the entire GDP of Australia every year, then you’re doing it wrong.

Mann’s reputation is already in flames. The onus at trial should be on the damage to Mann’s “reputation” generated by Mann’s own activism and his ‘like kind’ politically driven statements used against Judith Curry and others. Mann has made himself the political football, Steyn just kicked it through the goalposts. Is Steyn dealing with Mann the “scientist” or Mann the political propagandist?

Steyn’s description of the US courts, is Kleptocracy.
Full blown government by thieves, for thieves.
Just like our canadian Just-Us system.
After all, wasn’t it our Supreme Court that just ruled truth is no defence if you “Commit a Hate Crime”.
Translation, no law but what we say it is.And you dumb voters,taxpayers, ain’t “we”.

>We need a paypal button so people can contribute without buying anything.

If we contribute to his pocket, we will be accused of being a part of the great anti-science machine that is financing [blah-blah-blah]. If he can pull this off without ‘being financed’ as Mann undoubtedly is, it is yet another victory.

Mann’s only way out of this is to claim he is not a public figure. Steyn defense is to show that he is.

Mark Bofill: Me too. But I wasn’t being paid by the government to work on something with the phony kudos of saving the planet, at the expense of the lives of millions of the poorest for a decade or two until some better science and (most of all) policy came along. Not that Jones or Mann is to blame for all the abysmal policy made on the back of their work. But any such link should mean total openness, whatever the embarrassment.

Do we know that Mr. Steyn has not sought out and is currently receiving legal advice? I seriously doubt he is forging ahead without some sort of hired legal expertise, whether he chooses to have them represent him in court or not.

Adelaide news Feburary 1, 1933: ‘Climate Never Changes’ – The Commonwealth Meteorologist (Mr. Watt) smiles when he is asked about what is wrong with tthe weather, because all the records show that it is normal. “There has been no appreciable climatic change anywhere since the dawn of history,” said Mr. Watt today. When people compare the present with the past, they remember only the abnormal. The ordinary is forgotten. The belief that climate is changing is only an error of memory.”﻿

‘In reality the intent behind these refusals is much more mundane. For example, Jones did want to share his code because it was a mess.’

Perhaps. But, in the case of Warwick Hughes that was never his stated reason. Instead, Phil Jones commented to Hughes that he had 20+ years invested in his research and he wasn’t going to hand it over to Hughes so that he could try to prove him wrong. Hans von Storch exhibited amazement at Jones’ attitude. And I don’t think messy codes was the reason Mann never handed them over to McIntyre.

Certainly, McIntyre’s work would lead one to think that the case should be dismissed.

McIntyre’s rebuttals of Mann’s purported “exonerations” should be more than adequate grounds to establish a legitimate rationale for Steyn’s alleged libelous assertion. I just don’t think their introduction will ever be required after oral arguments as to resolution of the opinion vs. fact issue. We’ll see.

P.S. I like your use of a link to the post to which you are responding. I am henceforth stealing it (I saw no copyright) and trying my own variant ;-)

John Tyler says:
March 10, 2014 at 7:19 am
Did not Mann’s hockey stick plot dispense with the Medieval Warming Period? The existence of that warm period has never, ever been a matter of dispute.

The global nature of the MWP and its timing has been questioned however.

Are we to believe that Mann was unaware of this discrepancy?
Has it not been shown that Mann’s algorithm, which produced the hockey stick, will also produce a hockey stick if the entered data are random numbers?

If fed by autocorrelated red noise (not the same as what Mann did) M&M showed that some hockey sticks were produced (and some negative ones), they only showed 12 out of 10,000 results! The data entered by M&M were not just ‘random numbers’.

Are we to believe that Mann was unaware of this?

Why do you suppose that he would have run the tests that M&M did with an inappropriate noise model?

On many occasions, in regards to climate, the Hiroshima measurement standard has been evoked by the CAGW crowd. According to Mark Steyn it was Ezra Levant that gave him the lawyerly advice, in regards to his defamation trial by Mann, that he, Steyn, should go “nuclear.” I’d say it’s high time for the skeptic side to start measuring things with our own Hiroshima measurement standard. Man (and woman) up all you skeptics. It’s time for what goes around to come back around – good and hard.

does not giving up raw data and computer codes count as intent to deceive.

No. More like pig-headed childishness. The climategate emails reveal that while Mann may have allies, he doesn’t have many friends or true supporters that actually trust him. The “Team’s” support has more of an “enemy of my enemy” flavour. Otherwise Mann would have about as much support as Doug Cotton – maybe less.

“Reproducibility is regarded as one of the foundations of the entire scientific method, a benchmark upon which the reliability of an experiment can be tested” [http://explorable.com/reproducibility]

If a scientist’s experiment or study cannot be replicated for whatever reason, then that experiment does not meet the the definition of true science. It is my understanding that Mann has not released all his data, meta-data, methodologies, codes, etc. for the MBH 1998 study.whereby another scientist could repeat the exact study to confirm the results. A claim by Mann that the MBH1998 study is scientific would therefor be ****dulent. It would follow that for Steyn to claim Mann engaged in f**** (rhymes with “sod”) with respect to the hockey stick would indeed be true.

I am curious if/when Steyn prevails, does this expose UVA/Penn State and those that found no fault/fraud with Mann to legal consequences … as in conspiracy?

Personally, I think Mann is cooked. He is a public figure (reluctant by his own words, I believe). Steyn is a commentator of repute and long standing… Not much for Mann to stand on at trial.

The only problem I see at this point is if the jury is stacked with your usual knuckle-dragging, double-digit IQ, drooling on their own shoes type that is more interested in Dancing With The Stars and who just ‘know’ that CAGW is coming down the pike because they have heard it from the ‘reputable lame-stream’ media. (Which has nothing to do with the assertion of a fraudulent hockey stick.) Intelligence and truth do not always win out in a courtroom.

Still, if/when Mann loses, he will look around and then know his ‘friends’ have cast him aside as a once useful and now broken tool that is counterproductive to the ’cause.’ I am also curious if ‘Distinguished’
professor equates to ‘tenured’ professor. He might end up in the corner of a sub-basement reliving his glory days while churning out evermore flowery fake noble prize certificates on the worlds only working TRS-80.

When I profiled Michael Mann for Scientific American, he said he thought it would eventually be illegal to deny climate change.

My God…that is an astonishing statement. Were I NR/CEI’s lawyers, Mr. Appell would be subpoena’d to repeat, under oath, Mann’s statement in their anti-Slapp appeal. It speaks directly to the purpose of criminalizing free speech, precisely what anti-Slapp is designed to thwart.

An absolutely amazing and most germane revelation courtesy of Mr. Appell that it would eventually be illegal to deny climate change.

The problem is that Steyn has decided to be his own lawyer. He could very well be right on the merits, but lose because he doesn’t understand the law, because he will get outfoxed on a technicality that will sink his case. And then we will all be losers, because Michael Mann will have won, and won a case that had Steyn had a real lawyer, he would not have won.

*If* it can be shown that those who investigated or reviewed Mann’s work did not exercise proper due diligence in their review, and it can be shown that Mann ‘funnied-up’ his data and code, then those who investigated, in my opinion, enabled Mann. Not only to continue with his work, but to eventually file this lawsuit.

I am talking about a lawsuit against the reviewing entities apart from this Mann v. Steyn or Steyn v. Mann suit If it can be shown that Mann’s conclusions (the Hockey Stick) cannot be supported by the data and analysis used by Mann, then Steyn has been materially and substantially harmed by a baseless lawsuit. To me, that is an actionable offense. .An offense that could have been prevented by a more thorough review.

To my knowledge, ‘we’ have yet to see the data and the code. Have Mann defend his techniques and work in an open scientific forum. All I have seen is that he has defended his conclusions without allowing a detailed examination of anything supporting those conclusions. Same for those entities that reviewed his work.

If it comes down to a less than thorough review, somebody will have to admit to a less than competent review or something more sinister. Calling a scientist or Director of this, or a Department Chair of that, incompetent is like calling a soldier a coward. Or the Pope a pedophile. Reactions will be emotional and explosive. And that is when the whole AGW-thing explodes. Imagine a circular firing squad with Mann at the center and the reviewing entities as the squad.

Taking down Mann would be like kicking one leg off of a six-legged table. It is a start but will not end the whole CAGW myth based on the CO2 mantra that is now as political as ‘scientific.’ Knock down a few more of the the ‘scientific legs’ and all you have to worry about is the political legs that are left.

@stargazer – I concur with your conditional assessment. But I hope you are wrong about the criminal prosecution. There is too much subjective judgement in such an endeavor. While humiliation and refutation are fine, the fact is that the reviewers may have been negligent (probably were), but the determination is the scary part. I do not want the law involved in Mann’s downfall. Time and the earth will do that for us. When you start using subjective standards to enforce laws, you basically subvert the science. Subjective standards never remain the same.

That is a truism that Hansen, Mann and the rest of the charlatans have yet to learn. Yet it has been around since the dawn of civilization.

Steyn absolutely should go nuclear in his defense. I have zero doubt he can his defense of this suit. He has the evidence and the witnesses to back up the fact he believes what he wrote. However, he really should drop his suit against Mann. You cannot sue someone for suing you. You can sue for attorney’s fees after you win your defense, but that’s about it. Best wishes to Mark.

We need a paypal button so people can contribute without buying anything.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You can buy gift certificates and send them to the people of your choice.
M. Mann
Hansen
President of Penn State
President of Univ of Virgina….

“In reality the intent behind these refusals is much more mundane. For example, Jones did want to share his code because it was a mess.”

This explanation doesn’t help at all.
If Jones was embarrassed to release his code, he should have written a better code, rather then hide it.
The problem with messy code is not that it look bad, but that it is not clear whether it produces correct results. If he can’t read it, how can he know it actually calculates what it suppose to?
Because output looks about right?
But he didn’t just hid the code – he hid the actual data being processed by it. Was that because he was embarrassed by it’s quality?

….The global nature of the MWP and its timing has been questioned however….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Only as Part and Parcel of the Mann slapstick routine. Remember the MWP showed in the first IPCC report (Dr Lamb) so it was not ‘Questioned’ until it was necessary to get rid of it to make the temperature fit the narrative. The Team also got rid of the 1940s blip

Climate alarmists have claimed for quite some time that late-20th-century and early-21st-century global temperatures were so high as to merit the word “unprecedented” when comparing them to temperatures of the past millennium or two; and they also claim that this achievement was both driven and sustained by the carbon dioxide or CO2 released to the air by mankind’s burning of fossil fuels such as coal, gas and oil. But to maintain this dual contention, they have been forced to further contend that the well-known Medieval Warm Period was neither hemispheric nor global in scope, but merely confined to the much smaller region surrounding the North Atlantic Ocean. And they have also had to contend that the MWP was never really as warm as it had long been believed to be.

In introducing their paper of quite some time ago, Wilson et al. (1979) wrote that one of their main objectives in conducting the study it described was to compare the Period anywhere other than in temperature record from New Zealand – which they emphasized is “in the Southern Hemisphere and a region meteorologically countries surrounding the unrelated to Europe” – with the climate record of England, where the MWP had already made its mark on that country’s and the surrounding region’s climatic history. Their contribution to this endeavor was to decipher the 18O/16O profile from the core to the surface of a stalagmite obtained from a cave in New Zealand, which was dated by the 14C method. And in doing so, they found that the proxy temperature record provided by the stalagmite was broadly similar to the climate record of England, exhibiting a period in the early part of the past millennium that was about 0.75°C warmer than it was in the mid-20th-century.….

A quarter of a century later, Williams et al. (2004)2 wrote that their new paper on the subject…
revealed a warmer-than-present late-Holocene warm peak located between 0.9 and 0.6 ka BP that they equated with the Medieval Warm Period of Europe, further noting that this period “coincided with a period of Polynesian settlement (McGlone and Wilmshurst, 1999).” Thereafter, they further reported that temperatures “cooled rapidly to a trough about 325 years ago,” which they said corresponded to “the culmination of the ‘Little Ice Age’ in Europe.”…

….In clear contradiction of the claims of climate alarmists, these findings are but another example of the unending stream of studies from all around the world that continue to document the global presence of a warmer-than-present Medieval Warm Period; and they are becoming ever more difficult to deny, because they demonstrate that the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the Modern Warm Period….

The results of the several studies described greatly advance the thesis that the MWP was indeed a global phenomenon, wherein temperatures throughout the world were significantly warmer than they have been anytime subsequently….

….Ljungqvist used 120 proxy records — nearly 3 times as many proxies as previous studies and conclude: “during the 9th to 11th centuries there was widespread NH warmth comparable in both geographic extent and level to that of the 20th century”. Their proxies included ice-cores, pollen, marine sediments, lake sediments, tree-rings, speleothems and historical documentary data….

In April 2012 Christiansen and Ljungqvist published a study of 32 proxies going back as far as 1AD for the extra-tropical Northern Hemisphere. They found the first millennium was warmer than the second, that the Little Ice Age (17th Century) was awfully cold and colder than the “Dark Ages” cooling (circa 300- 800AD), and about −1.0 °C below the 1880–1960AD level. It warmed a bit in the 1700′s then cooled again in the 1800′s almost back to where it was in the 1600′s. The Little Ice Age appears in records across vast areas, and the three century pattern of colder-warmer-and-almost-as-cold-again repeats all around the Northern Hemisphere….

“I’m surprised NRO hasn’t chosen to be more feisty. This is their chance to win a Pulitzer!”

I’m thinking Steyn and NRO parted company because Steyn found their insurers too confining. They’ll keep their heads down and play nice like their lawyers ask while Steyn plays bad cop. And I doubt they believe they’d ever have a shot at the Pulitzer.

Steven Mosher
March 10, 2014 at 8:21
says:
‘In reality the intent behind these refusals is much more mundane. For example, Jones did want to share his code because it was a mess.’
==============
for example? Why not actually quote what he wrote?
“Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.”

Replication is the hallmark of science. And here we have a scientist afraid that someone might be able to prove him wrong? What better test of a theory is there than someone tries to prove you wrong and fails. You would think Jones would welcome the chance – unless he knew that his work was not replicable.

@John Tyler – I’m with you, Fraud is fraud., and the Womann-named-Sue deserves the worst that could befall her. GO MARK STEYN, and throw in a few MOABs (Mother of All Bombs) along with your nukes, for punctuation, while you’re at it.

Most states follow the “innocent construction” rule. That means that if any interpretation of Steyn’s comment can be interpreted as nondefamatory, it will be. There is a “choice of law” issue here (which states law will be followed by the federal court). An innocent construction motion to dismiss the complaint can be brought up before or after discovery, but here discovery should be pursued, including carefully scripted depositions. If Steyn gets himself a competent attorney he should win, especially since he didn’t call Mann a fraud, but the hockey stick theory.

TBear – I think you have misunderstood the quote. Steyn had written at length about how Elmasry, five years later, is irrelevant and almost invisible, whereas when Steyn first took him on he was a prominent public figure who was quoted and courted by the media. That was the real damage that Steyn inflicted on him, irrespective of the formal outcome.

Fraud, knowingly supplying information that supports a falsified hypothesis, when there is no rational fact to this conclusion, and refusing to submit ones data is corrupting the data to prove your hypothesis. That’s scientific fraud. Like the Piltdown man. Just hope the judge isn’t a creationist, that still believe the world was created in six days. And quoting Sarah Palin, ‘humans walked with dinosaurs…?” Put another 00000000 on the end then the sequences of evolution is most probably right as put down in Genesis. That is corrupting the data to prove the hypothesis. With the scientific world per IPCC consensus, don’t want one of their own charged with scientific fraud, Steyn is doing humanity a great service. Go Mark!

Interesting posting in Steve Goddard’s blog recently, showing that the treemometers were dead accurate, but once the records had been fudged, they didn’t match any more. So the “paste-over” had to be done — matching fudges!

Let’s suppose a scientist makes a fundamental mistake which invalidates his conclusions. If it’s a genuine mistake then clearly it’s not fraud, it’s a mistake.

But suppose that the mistake is clear and publicly provable, and that the scientist is aware of this. If the scientist refuses to retract the research then it becomes fraudulent.

In the case of Mann, there are many obvious problems, as demonstrated by McIntyre and McKitrick. But there appears to be one that eclipses all the others: if you feed in random (red) data, Mann’s method still creates perfect hockey sticks. If that’s true then, clearly, MBH98 should be withdrawn.

Clearly Mann is aware of this problem. If it could be proven in court that Mann was aware of the problem, and that the problem can be proven in court, then Mann would lose.

Chris Wright says:
March 11, 2014 at 4:15 am
Let’s suppose a scientist makes a fundamental mistake which invalidates his conclusions. If it’s a genuine mistake then clearly it’s not fraud, it’s a mistake.

But suppose that the mistake is clear and publicly provable, and that the scientist is aware of this. If the scientist refuses to retract the research then it becomes fraudulent.

In the case of Mann, there are many obvious problems, as demonstrated by McIntyre and McKitrick. But there appears to be one that eclipses all the others: if you feed in random (red) data, Mann’s method still creates perfect hockey sticks. If that’s true then, clearly, MBH98 should be withdrawn.

But that hasn’t been done, M&M didn’t feed in ‘random (red) data’, they used data with inappropriate choice of parameters which were designed to produce ‘hockey sticks’. When challenged about what they’d done they dodged and weaved and avoided addressing the point. They didn’t use Mann’s method they used a different one that they’d made up.

The court case in Canada Steyn won consisted of him throwing the word “anti-semitic” at some Muslims, and them throwing the word “Islamophobic” back. He won this battle of political correctness, because he was on the more powerful side. That is not the case with the Michael Mann case, and he shouldn’t be so confident of winning.

When I profiled Michael Mann for Scientific American, he said he thought it would eventually be illegal to deny climate change.

My God…that is an astonishing statement. Were I NR/CEI’s lawyers, Mr. Appell would be subpoena’d to repeat, under oath, Mann’s statement in their anti-Slapp appeal. It speaks directly to the purpose of criminalizing free speech, precisely what anti-Slapp is designed to thwart.

An absolutely amazing and most germane revelation courtesy of Mr. Appell.

Mann could settle out of court? You withdraw your case and I will withdraw mine. I hope Mark doesn’t opt for this easy solution. It depends on his prosecuting defense and what evidence they have that seals their case?

I beleive Michael Mann qualifies as a “public figure” for purposes of the libel laws. He can only sue under a limited set of circumstances involving reckless disregard of or intentionally misreporting facts. It’s a pretty high bar in most cases. Here’s wishing him a big ol can of Mark Steyn whupa$$.

“But that hasn’t been done, M&M didn’t feed in ‘random (red) data’, they used data with inappropriate choice of parameters which were designed to produce ‘hockey sticks’. When challenged about what they’d done they dodged and weaved and avoided addressing the point. They didn’t use Mann’s method they used a different one that they’d made up”

richard says:
March 13, 2014 at 8:08 am
“But that hasn’t been done, M&M didn’t feed in ‘random (red) data’, they used data with inappropriate choice of parameters which were designed to produce ‘hockey sticks’. When challenged about what they’d done they dodged and weaved and avoided addressing the point. They didn’t use Mann’s method they used a different one that they’d made up”

I don’t think that cherry picking is unusual if you want to prove one’s hypothesis is correct. Corrupting the data to suit the hypothesis is a well known academic exercise that can be fully pointed out by other academics. Especially polls and statistical data. If you get a grant to prove your data collected proves a scientifically based hypothesis or theory, it is open to other scientists coming back at you with credible criticisms. If I only pick one tree species to base my data on, what does that prove? You have to prove your experiment is correct by applying many variables. Like this species in England did not suffer the same growth pattern as my tree. Gosh, put a deciduous tree against an evergreen would show definite patterns of growth dissimilarities. Not only because their natural growth patterns but also one sheds its leave during winter and the other stays fully leafed or needled because it has adapted to handle cold weather. His data is off the air. “Tell a lie long enough, and people will believe it.” Who said that Goebels or one of leading Nazis?

richard says:
March 13, 2014 at 8:08 am
“But that hasn’t been done, M&M didn’t feed in ‘random (red) data’, they used data with inappropriate choice of parameters which were designed to produce ‘hockey sticks’. When challenged about what they’d done they dodged and weaved and avoided addressing the point. They didn’t use Mann’s method they used a different one that they’d made up”